In dental medicine, intensive use is made of rotating instruments by which teeth are treated, using boring, grinding and polishing bodies. In this connection, liquid grinding or polishing pastes are frequently employed which based on the rotation of the instrument have the tendency to penetrate, together with water, saliva and blood, along the shafts of the boring, grinding and polishing bodies into the interior of the rotating instruments.
Similarly, part of these materials creeps back to the boring, grinding or polishing body. In this way, in fact, a permanent exchange of foreign material takes place between the interior of the rotating instruments and the boring, grinding or polishing bodies.
The abrasive properties of the foreign substances penetrating into the instruments promote rapid corrosion of the ball or journal bearings and of the other movable parts so that the life of the precision instruments is considerably reduced. For maintaining a long operation, intensive maintenance of the instruments is therefore indispensable.
Because of the permanent exchange of partly infectious foreign substances between the interior of the instruments and the boring, grinding or polishing bodies makes clear that for hygienic reasons a thorough cleansing and disinfection of the instruments after each patient treatment would be advisable.
The external area of the rotating instruments will be disinfected after each treatment. This is normally done by spraying with suitable disinfecting agents. By so doing, however, a small portion of the agents reaches the instruments. The larger portion is sprayed past the instruments and pollutes the air of the room.
Maintenance of the internal area of the instruments is executed normally only once at the end of a treatment day. This maintenance consists in passing a maintenance liquid through the interior of the instruments. It has been shown that a high cleaning effect is obtained if the movable parts in the instruments are rotated while the maintenance liquid is passed therethrough. A major part of the hitherto-employed maintenance procedures provides that the liquid is introduced into the rotating instruments and is ejected when it is in operation.
It is therefore common to make the rotating instruments run in order to spin away the residues. It cannot be excluded that residual liquid will exit while the patient is being treated.
In a predominant number of treatment cases, the maintenance liquid is applied from spray cans. This has the consequence that in addition to the volatile constituents included in the maintenance liquids, propellant gases are also released into the air of the room. When performing maintenance measures in the interior surfaces of the rotating instruments after each treatment of a patient, which should basically be required, the concentration of harmful substances in the ambient air of the dental treatment room together with further sources of harmful substances would reach a dangerous level.
Starting from the above-described state of the art, it is now the aim of the present invention to provide an extensively self-performing disinfecting and cleansing process for the rotating instruments in dental clinics by which the aforementioned disadvantages are extensively avoided.